Last year TokBox introduced the OpenTok Interactive Broadcast API. Ours became the first platform to marry the real-time capability of WebRTC with the reach of HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). The Interactive Broadcast API is helping our customers build large-scale interactive video experiences including live online auctions, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), webinars, social apps and more.

Over the past 6 months we’ve continued to innovate in the broadcast space, pushing the boundaries of performance while ensuring massive scale. Today we’re proud to announce major enhancements to our Interactive Broadcast API.

Now we offer support for:

Mass Scale: Up to 3,000 real-time interactive viewers

We’re increasing the number of real-time participants that can view and participate in a broadcast event to 3,000. Our new scalable, distributed architecture makes this possible. Now, as the size of your event fluctuates, our media servers will dynamically scale to meet your needs. Best of all? Our media servers keep latency to under 300ms. No need for the traditional five to ten second broadcast delay. With all participants in the same TokBox session, your application can easily promote any viewer to be an active participant in the broadcast discussion. This supports all kinds of audience or fan participation. Your event hosts and participants can be distributed worldwide and changed dynamically.

While real-time broadcast capabilities are what differentiate the OpenTok platform, we know that some use cases value massive global reach over real-time interaction. Last year we launched support for broadcast streaming through a CDN to support mass scale applications (with only a few seconds of delay). Today, we’re launching support for RTMP streaming. Now you can stream directly into any video platform that offers an API for content ingestion – this includes Facebook Live, Twitch.tv, YouTube Live and more. Ultimately, by tapping into existing user bases in these well-known social networks, your events have the potential to go viral.

How does it work? If you’re building a traditional ‘talk show’ format, your panel of presenters are on stage interacting in real-time. Thousands of audience members are viewing the conversation in real-time, and have the option to ‘join’ the presenters on stage. To further extend reach, the ‘talk show’ can be streamed through a social network like YouTube Live.

The new world of broadcast is evolving quickly. As a result, TokBox is working hard to make sure our platform not only enables today’s use cases, but also accelerates innovation in the space.